In recent years, sharply increased amounts of data have been used by corporations and individuals, and storage systems have been larger in scale and increased in complexity. To enable effective operations of such an entire storage system, there are methods by which a management computer manages integrally configuration information on the storage system including a storage apparatus, a host computer, and the like.
As a technique for acquiring configuration information on a storage system by a management computer, there has been disclosed a technique for acquiring configuration on a storage system at two stages, for example (for example, refer to PTL 1). According to this technique, at the first stage, only basic information on resources (identifiers, numbers, and relations among the resources) held in the storage system, the host computer, and the like are acquired from these apparatuses. Next, based on the acquired basic information, the range of detailed configuration information to be acquired, timing for acquisition of the detailed information, necessity of holding the detailed information are decided. Then, at the second stage, in the appropriate timing, the detailed configuration information in the appropriate range is acquired. Accordingly, the management computer can manage efficiently the configuration information on the storage system in an integrated fashion with respect to the information holding amount.
In addition, there has been realized an integral virtualization technique for integrating a plurality of storage apparatuses into another storage apparatus (for example, refer to PTL 2).